Sertorio wrote: ↑Tue Feb 05, 2019 4:42 pm
For Europeans like us, it is almost unavoidable that a bunch of slant eyed, very rigid, very disciplined military personnel, will seem more threatening than people who look a lot like us, who are easy going and enjoy very much the same things we do, even if they live on the other side of the Atlantic and tend to be a bit ignorant about Europe...
Come on Sertorio, this is a strawman's argument and you know it.
No racism whatsoever in my reaction to vast armies in impeccable Prussian order answering a single man who is their unchallenged and lifetime Leader and swearing loyalty until death to his Party. This is a sketch that recalls Hitler or Stalin adressing their respective peoples. Do you think Germans or Russians have slant eyes?
If Donald Trump organized similar ceremonies with US forces - which he could not, he's a president not a dictator with totalitarian trend - wouldn't you also be repelled by the sight?
Note that
this is a relatively new feature of PRC government. Previous first secretaries were chosen as prime bureaucrats and limit was imposed to the time they could keep their posts.
Xi Jinping has removed those limits, at the same time when he imposed new limits to Chinese society (such as experiments about "social credit" Big Brother system, Muslim Uighrs in concentration camps for "reeducation" by the hundreds of thousands, enhanced repression of Christianity), purged the Party of all potential rivals with help of an "anti-corruption" campaign, proposed a nationalist drive for international power and tried to impose the idea that all of China's successes were his personal own!
So the evil Yellow people are a threat to us, and the good spirited Yankees are our eternal saviours... Unfortunately the stereotypes are very unhelpful, and the real threat to world peace comes in fact from the US, not from China... As we can see by the aggressiveness shown by the US against any country not willing to toe their line.
I've never said that Americans would be "our eternal saviours". Those are your words, not mine.
What I've said is that among the two superpowers of our time, one is taking a
specially dangerous path.
Note that the US are still a democracy, they have vigorous internal debates, which is the guarantee that with time they will be able to improve on their errors. Like all the Portugal, France, India or Japan of this world... like democracies, which have built-in mechanisms for improvement.
China is going in the opposite direction, from a "simple" dictatorship with prosperity as its main objective back to some forms of totalitarianism (and will they stop?) with nationalism as motivation.